


Continue firm and constant

by aesc



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Best Friends, Domestic, Kid Fic, M/M, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-06
Updated: 2013-12-06
Packaged: 2018-01-03 20:48:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1072894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aesc/pseuds/aesc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moira hasn't seen her old partner in saving the world from threats human and intergalactic, Erik Lehnsherr, for a few years. When she finally does see him again, she finds a man different from the one who's been with her down in the dark and the dirt and the blood... or maybe he isn't so different after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Continue firm and constant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pocky_slash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocky_slash/gifts).



> For the lovely and wonderful **fourteenacross**. I tried to get in as many of your favorite things as was reasonably possible, and I hope you enjoy them!  <3

**Continue firm and constant**

The kitchen sat at the back of the house, hidden away, Moira imagined, where the servants belonged. As long as she focused on how snug it was, with its old dark blue tiles and wood stove hunkered in the corner, and the table at which she sat – smoothed in places where generations of elbows and hands had rested – and not about how there was a million more square feet of house around her, she would be fine. She definitely, she told herself, would not be overcome by how surreal it was seeing Erik Lehnsherr at home in such a place.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but this is just really surreal."

"Really? I don't think you've said that for at least two minutes." Erik frowned at the jar on the counter in front of him, and the lid of the jar popped off.

"Well, it is." Her gaze couldn't rest, not on Lehnsherr, not on any one object in the room. It roved around, from the old cast-iron pots and pans on their hooks over the island to the stove again to the ultra-modern coffee maker growling to itself in its corner. The door leading out to the yard had steel bars set into its little window – reinforced, no doubt, by the man at the kitchen counter.

Lehnsherr caught her looking, of course. Damn him. He wore a tiny smile at the corner of his mouth, the kind of smile that invited you to read all your insecurities into it. Moira generally admitted to no such thing as insecurity – she'd fought and lost and won too much to let anyone have that kind of power over her – but she had a feeling Lehnsherr knew anyway, even if he wasn't a telepath. They'd spent long enough together, longer than the other teams in their division. And, she had to admit, he very nearly had the right to know; he'd earned that knowledge of her.

Speaking of which. "Fury's a little angry you left with your head stuffed full of international secrets and didn't show up to your appointment with Frost so she could sweep them up."

"Not getting what he wants once in a while would be good for him," Lehnsherr said absently. He stuck an absurdly tiny spoon into the jar. "It's a lesson many could stand to learn. Isn't that right, darling?"

"Apple!" said the two-year-old in her high chair, waving her pudgy hands at the jar of applesauce. She added, in case it wasn't clear what she wanted, "Sauuuuuuce."

"Yes, sauce," Lehnsherr agreed. He settled himself down in the chair across from Moira, and set the little plastic bowl and plastic spoon, both green and adorned with ducks and ladybugs, on the table, along with a shaker of cinnamon. "Can I trust you to eat this and not fling it across the room?"

"Sauce!" shrieked the toddler, banging on her tray and giving one emphatic bounce.

The toddler was the one thing in the room Moira felt that to acknowledge meant acknowledging the unstable line between reality and drug-induced hallucination. Right now, the toddler was bouncing on her diapered bottom, alternating between gesturing for the applesauce and smacking the tray of her high chair. She wore nothing other than her diaper – "Bloodstains are easy to get out compared to baby food," Lehnsherr had said when Moira had made a smart remark on the lack of adorable onesie – and her blue-green, scaly skin, and a demanding scowl that, despite the lack of biological relationship, was very clearly and purely Lehnsherr.

Erik Lehnsherr had a _toddler_. Moira had seen and survived an extra-dimensional alien invasion, had seen death pass right in front of her on his way to someone else and lived to tell the tale, and yet those things seemed almost everyday next to the sight of Erik Lehnsherr in a battered t-shirt with a beard and a harried expression, stirring a bit of cinnamon into a bowl of homemade applesauce.

Also, Erik Lehnsherr was married. He was married to a biology professor who lived in a castle. If Moira had woken up in a bed with a ring on her finger, next to a man claiming he was her husband, she couldn't have been more surprised than when she'd gotten the news from Fury.

The surprise she'd been able to swallow. The irrational sense of betrayal, of loss, hadn't been. It still lodged in her throat sometimes when she looked at Lehnsherr's empty jump seat on the plane, or the nameplate on the door to the quarters that weren't his anymore.

Bitterness threatened again. Moira turned from that and turned to look at Lehnsherr as he moved competently around his kitchen, the invisible fingers of his ability making adjustments to his surroundings, an unobtrusive, tidy poltergeist. Some cooking pans levitated themselves off their hooks and down to the stove, and the dishwasher's door yawned, silverware flying out to nest in its own drawers.

"So," Lehnsherr said as he placed the bowl of applesauce and the spoon on the high chair. Raven – that was the little girl's name; Moira had almost missed it through her shock at seeing Erik Lehnsherr greeting her at the front door with a baby girl on his hip and a few knives hovering behind him – seized the spoon and began to stab energetically at the applesauce. "Is Fury going to try to drag me back? I know he'd never send a helicarrier after me. You're much more effective."

Moira gave him the benefit of her most skeptical expression. "Really, Lehnsherr, you're terrible at being disarming. Unless you're literally disarming someone."

"It's true." Behind him, the kitchen continued to rearrange itself, bits and pieces being tidied away. "I made it fairly clear what would happen if anyone came here with the idea of asking me back or taking me back, if I said no." He watched Raven closely, as if the fixity of his gaze could keep her anchored here and safe, as if Moira might spirit her away. "I also made clear what Charles would do, which would be far worse than what I could manage. But you…." The silence didn't say whether Erik would carry out those threats against her or not.

"Then it's a good thing that I'm not here on business, isn't it?" Moira settled herself back in her chair. "I think I'm allowed to miss my old partner."

The smile Lehnsherr offered her, sidewise and wry, transformed him from Lehnsherr into Erik, co-inhabitant with her of countless lousy motels and seatmate on as many flights and road trips. She couldn't listen to Kitty's voice over radio or see her move out of the corner of her eye without slight surprise at not hearing Erik's voice or feeling the well-known patterns of his movements. Not that she would admit that to Lehnsherr in a million years, but not admitting it didn't change the facts.

"I might miss you, too," Erik said contemplatively. "At least, when I want conversation more edifying than a two-year-old's."

"You mean you don't talk about preschool admissions and baby yoga with the rest of play group?" Erik snorted. Raven cackled. Moira tried, and failed, not to smile. "I'm glad I could fill a gap in your life, Lehnsherr."

"You've always done that."

Before Moira could say anything to that – if there was anything to be said – Erik stood up. He confiscated the applesauce and spoon from Raven, who had been using the latter to drip the former on her tray, and thrust them at Moira. "She needs her snack, so if you could see that some of it goes into her face while I see about dinner? Will you be staying?"

"Uh… sure?" Moira dug out a spoonful of sauce and presented it to Raven, who regarded it with suspicious golden eyes. "Here, eat up."

Raven leaned forward and clamped her mouth shut around the bowl of the spoon, slurping at it with toddlerish enthusiasm. "You realize," Moira said, offering another spoonful to Raven, "I didn't come here so I could audition for nanny while you go back to saving the world."

"No such position." Erik summoned his laptop over to the kitchen island and began to type. "This isn't an act, you know. Fury didn't secretly set me up undercover as a husband and stay-at-home dad. I'm not pining to go back." _I'm not going back_ , was what Erik meant. He had never done anything by half-measures.

"I know." Moira bit her lip. _You already knew his answer._

Raven, catching the mood, sat back in her high chair. She twisted around to look over her shoulder. "Daddy? _Daddy_."

"I know, liebchen." Erik looked up from his computer and gestured, making the little iron bracelet on Raven's wrist spin. Reassured, Raven laughed and resettled herself, and even accepted another mouthful of applesauce.

"You didn't invite me to the wedding," Moira said, as archly as she could, ignoring Erik's _We didn't have a wedding. It was the two of us and the justice of the peace_. "I'd have at least sent a gift certificate to Pottery Barn. Not that you need it."

"You're here now," Erik said gruffly. He pulled ingredients down from their cabinets, arranging them on the counter – probably in order of use, measuring cups and spoons laid out in front of them. "And I… You know why I signed on, Moira. You were the only person who understood, even if you didn't share my motives. You seemed to get it, when everyone else couldn't."

Moira had never said Schmidt's name in Erik's presence, only his alias. He'd always been _Shaw_ to her, another target among many, but to Erik he had been so much more. A reason for existence, Moira had thought sometimes as she'd watched Erik obsess over the files, or the night before that last mission to apprehend Shaw, defining the entirety of Erik's life.

"You stayed for a year after that," Moira reminded him. She didn't say that she'd hoped Erik would have changed in his time with her, that he'd stay, even though she'd always known he wouldn't. 

"I found something else," Erik said, closed tone shutting off anything else Moira might say.

Erik tapped at the computer; he was, Moira realized, looking at a recipe. "I'm very selfish, Moira. Fury saw that and knew it and was fine with it. You definitely saw it, considering how much time you spent harassing me. I think Fury didn't quite understand how we got along, you with love of country and me out for blood."

"We got along because I was the only one able to put up with your bull – " Moira coughed. "Nonsense."

"Bull!" Raven shrieked.

"Nice save." Erik scooped herbs into whatever he was mixing. "I paid a price for what I wanted, Moira. Once I'd gotten what I'd wanted, I decided I needed to stop paying. It was either that or let the government suck out whatever Shaw couldn't. After we dealt with Trask and WideAwake… it seemed as good a time as any to leave."

"After you found Professor Xavier, you mean." Moira scraped up the last of the applesauce and made sure it went into Raven's mouth and stayed there. "I don't really buy that you _accidentally_ ran into him at a coffee shop after we spent six months making sure Trask and the Friends of Humanity didn't turn one of Xavier's mutant rights lectures into a hate crime."

Erik said nothing to that, but Moira knew him well enough to know that peculiar set of his shoulders, the mulish silence that said he knew she was right but would rather die than admit it. He summoned over a spoon, which began to stir the contents of the bowl as a metal pot lifted off its hook to settle on one of the burners. Erik fetched a box of pasta himself. 

"More?" Raven said, pawing at Moira's hand and leaving stickiness behind.

Moira scraped the last bit of applesauce from the bowl and persuaded most of it into Raven's mouth. Raven smacked her lips happily, beaming up at Moira with a mouthful of tiny toddler teeth. A smile twitched onto Moira's mouth and remained there defiantly, long enough for Erik, damn him, to look up from his measuring spoons and see it.

Some kind of white fish went into the bowl and got sloshed around before Erik spoke again. "It's important you understand, Moira… I'd do anything for them. Far more than I'd do for Fury."

"I see that," Moira said softly, studying the intricate patterns of the scales that made up Raven's skin, seeing them but also seeing a photograph of a young man smiling up at her from the pages of a dossier. She could understand it now, seeing Erik here.

Erik had seen the same file and read the same brief, _Subject X has been targeted by numerous anti-mutant hate groups, including FoH and Purifiers. It is believed that any assassination attempt would trigger large-scale, destabilizing riots among the mutant population, and backlash by humans. While Subject X is a telepath, effectiveness of counter-mutant technology should not be underestimated; close surveillance, and subject's cooperation, is required._

Erik had taken that directive and run with it, run with it to a giant house in Westchester and a wedding ring around his finger and an adopted baby girl. In her less charitable moments, Moira wanted to see that as _running_ , from responsibility, from danger – but then, she supposed, she'd run as well, in her own way, eight years ago. It had either been go to SHIELD or stay stuck in the endless rut of the CIA. 

_You run_ , her mother had always said, _to get where you're going_.

"I don't know how you put up with the mess," Moira said as she examined the drying sauce that coated Raven's face and neck. "You'd flip out at me if I didn't make my bed first thing in the morning. Or didn't eat everything on my plate."

"With good reason," Erik said. He stowed the fish in the refrigerator and, while a knife chopped potatoes, he advanced on a now-wriggling Raven with a damp cloth. "If you don't have discipline, you have —"

His head came up, grey eyes focusing on a place beyond the kitchen wall and the courtyard. Moira tensed, wishing acutely for the gun that would ride beneath her arm, or the knife in her boot, but those had been tucked away in her locker. Raven looked between the two of them and giggled.

"It's Charles," Erik said, attention returning to the kitchen again as if nothing had happened. His mouth had shifted upward slightly, though, and as he moved through cleaning up the counter – and giving Moira a warm, damp cloth for Raven, saying "Don't rub at her scales, just brush" – he would pause as if listening, or smile briefly before pushing the expression away.

Prior to Dr. Charles Xavier pushing through the side door, Moira had met the man once in her life, at a bar in Oxford. He had been drinking and flirting gently with the bartender as she and Erik had come in the door, as if he hadn't been slated to give a major presentation on mutant rights the following day. Before he'd looked up, she'd managed to hear what had to have been one of the most embarrassing pickup lines ever, something about the young woman's OAC2 mutation.

_And you have quite a nice OAC2 mutation yourself_ , Charles Xavier said in the present day, memorably red mouth quirked in a smile; Moira heard the words now and in her memory, both at once, as if Xavier had pulled them up from storage. _But I'm a bit more intrigued by your partner's XKE3 mutation. It's absolutely lovely._

"Papaaaaa!" said Raven.

"Hello again, Agent MacTaggert," Xavier said, out loud this time and very much in the here-and-now and British as ever. "And hello to _you_ , dearest."

Moira nodded politely and kept the surface of her thoughts calm, the way she'd learned when Fury had sent her for training – torture, really – with Frost, before playing bodyguard for a serenely naïve professor. Xavier caught that, of course, and smiled again. He pressed that smiling mouth to Raven's head and accepted a smacking, sauce-accented kiss in return.

"Not that cheek," Erik said when Xavier wheeled up to him. He bent and kissed Xavier on the mouth instead, quick and chaste. His eyes flickered shut, briefly. "We're having fish."

"And a guest," Xavier said. Something silent passed between them, something that had what Moira might call _affection_ softening the hard lines around Erik's eyes and mouth. 

Xavier tried to steal a piece of carrot off the cutting board. Steel glittered on his right wrist, a watchband made of solid, sturdy links. Erik put a stop to the attempted theft, but instead of smacking away Xavier's hand, Erik closed his fingers around that steel circle, pressing down and tight. Moira wiped gently at Raven's cheek.

"She's as clean as she's going to get," Moira announced, setting the cloth down on the table.

"We'll see how long that lasts." Xavier, _please you can call me Charles_ , managed to abscond with a piece of carrot after all, when Erik had turned around to pull a head of broccoli from the refrigerator. "She has an aversion to clothes and a love of being dirty, unfortunately."

"Dirty," Raven agreed. She stretched out her arms. "Up? Up?"

"Up," Charles affirmed. He swung her out of her high chair and into his lap, settling her against his chest. Raven immediately latched on to his hair, which was as thick and wavy as ever; Charles Xavier hadn't changed, not so far as Moira could see, as if he hadn't been the target of an attempted assassination and hadn't had two government agents disrupting his academic peace for months.

_Oh, I've changed_ , Charles said, as up-front as he'd ever been, unashamed about his abilities. _I had to make sure you were here for your own reasons, not anyone else's._

_Erik's my friend_ , Moira told him, straightening a little. Charles had always been an assignment to her, not the could-be friend he'd been to Erik, playing chess and arguing at all hours. _That friendship is the only reason I'd ever come here._

_I know that now_. Charles settled Raven more comfortably and gently extricated her pudgy fingers from his hair. Out loud, he said, "You've very welcome here, Agent MacTaggert."

"Please," Moira said, offering him a smile of her own, "you can call me Moira."

"Lovely." Charles wheeled himself around the table, over to a large, modern and steel-sided refrigerator. "I see that Erik's neglected to offer you anything. Can I get you wine? Red or white?"

"Red," Moira told him, and for Erik's sake pretended she didn't see the soft smile Erik wore when he looked up from his work to study the three of them, or feel the affectionate brush of Erik's power across the silver chain she wore around her neck. "You must go through a lot of those, with Lehnsherr around."

"Hmmm," Charles hummed. Once he returned to the table – Moira saw the place left empty – with bottle and glasses, he proceeded to pour for both of them, expertly keeping the glasses out of Raven's curious reach. It was only when he saw Moira equipped with her drink and poured for himself and Erik as well, that he said, "What brings you out this way?"

"Every now and then I need a break from saving the world." Moira ran her finger around the lip of her glass, listening to the faint resonance. "And it's been too long since I've tormented Lehnsherr."

"It stands to reason your friends would be like you, darling," Charles said, smiling a smile Erik couldn't see but apparently felt; he rolled his eyes and shook his head, but seemed amused all the same.

"I'll take that as a compliment." Erik turned away as he said it.

Moira absorbed that silently, tasting the thought like she tasted the wine on her tongue. It was warm and rich, and like Erik, metallic in places, but not unpleasant. Like the wine, a new thought spread through her: that the Erik in front of her was the one she'd always known, who'd had her back in countless firefights and sat with her down in the dirt and the dark and carried her along with him the few times she couldn't carry herself. This place, the kitchen with Charles and Raven sitting by her, with Erik watching over the three of them, was part of him – a new part, but inextricably linked with the man who had been her friend for years. Although it had changed to accommodate newcomers (she'd seen already how Erik bent around Charles, a dance she hadn't seen him do with anyone else), she still had space in the geography of Erik's life.

He was _happy_. Maybe that was the essential difference, that he was truly happy, as close to peace as a person like Erik Lehnsherr could ever get – and she was included in that happiness, as she'd always been.

"Can I help you with anything, Lehnsherr?" she asked. Her voice seemed to cut the moment apart, a release that pushed her thoughts to a corner of her mind where she could sit with them later. "God knows I had to help you with enough, back in the day."

"As if I'd trust you around a knife," Erik said. Charles laughed, a laugh she remembered very well, honest and delighted. "But you might as well make yourself useful and make the salad."

"Did I tell you about the time I turned a salad spinner into a projectile?" Moira asked as she stood up. Charles laughed abruptly, twisting in his seat to follow her, perhaps wanting to hear more. "And, Charles, I should tell you about how much plastic made Erik angry."

"No, you shouldn't," Erik said.

Moira did anyway, leading Charles through Erik's detailed rant about the plastic and resin components on the helicarrier, and as she began to set out the salad ingredients – prosaic, all of them, so far removed from rifle parts and bullets and bomb components – she could only think of how good it was to work next to him again. They knew, even now, how to inhabit each other's space, to work around and with each other, something she still had to learn with Sean, who was still awkward and in awe. She hadn't learned Erik overnight; studying him had been the work of years, and somewhere in there, they'd become friends.

"Don't let Erik rope you into doing everything," Charles said, although he also set the table when Erik floated silverware over to him. "You're our guest."

"That's what friends are for, and so on," Moira said, ignoring Erik's impatient huff. "Lehnsherr, pass the pepper, will you?"

Erik put the fish on and set the timer, and chivvied Moira back to the kitchen table. He sat next to Charles, and right away their fingers twined together, Erik's index finger rubbing the steel ring around Charles's left third finger. Charles smiled at him, an expression that old Lehnsherr might have called _soppy_ , but one that got one of those rare, genuine smiles, one that turned Erik's thin, severe mouth into something warm and welcoming. A sense of happiness suffused the room, not precisely Moira's – but Charles's, and Erik's, even Raven's, all of them melted together and projected like the last of the warm sunlight outside.

"Glad you're here," MacTaggert," Erik grumbled, raising his glass to her.

"Glad to be here," Moira said, tapping the rim of her glass against his. She _was_ glad, more than that. Content, maybe.

"Glad!" Raven screeched.


End file.
